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Chapter 3
Ghost City
TEN-THOUSAND SKULLS IN THE SOIL OF ALDWEN PARK
― Lens of Truth, 6-27-355
It’s hard for me to articulate what it feels like to look at the ruins of an entire city. Blocks of crumbling skyscrapers, streets overtaken by vines. The shock, the hollow feeling that people once lived here, never really wears off. I was raised in New Lens, the preserved core of the city, remodeled from what was left of the old downtown - for a certain definition of raised. Back then, the Ghost City felt like a big playground. Now that I was an adult? That I had many more living, breathing places to compare it to?
“Cole,” said a voice to my right. Emmaline had swapped her dress for some purple and black sportswear somewhere along the road, after I told her we were in for a bit of a hike. I appreciated the half-hearted gesture at practicality. She was staring at the trailhead, unimpressed. “This is not a trail.”
“This is not a trail anymore,” I stressed, tapping my Pocket Guide. “It shut down two years ago. Not enough money to keep it maintained.”
Indeed, this particular trail had seen better days, and was missing many of the distinguishing features one would associate with a safe passageway - like a lack of sprouts crawling up through the rubble. In other ways, though… “We’re unlikely to run into any unstable buildings, uncrossable chasms, or impossible climbs.” I said. “They used to take middle-schoolers through here. It’s safe.”
I didn’t need to look at her to know she was skeptical, but I did anyway, checking her backpack in the process. “You’re going to need water.” I informed her.
I could see the gears turning in her head, as she realized this would be more involved than she initially assumed. I didn’t bother waiting for her to try to scrounge something up. Instead, I took my deck from my pocket and shuffled through my cards until I reached the hearts, which I had set aside for life support. Ace of Hearts contained water, of course. So did the next four cards in the suit, in increasing quantities. With a thought, I withdrew a two liter water bottle from the card. I cupped the deck in my palm and spread my arms out.
“You’re going to have to teach me that trick, some day.” Emma stated, tugging on the strap of her backpack.
“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.” I repeated blithely.
She regarded me with a stern look, and before I could react, a tendril of shadow snaked out of the ground and grabbed the water bottle, bringing it to her. “Not interested,” she said.
Was it the innuendo that she was reacting to? Or was it the offer in general? “For the record,” I said, “I was joking about-”
“Not. Interested.” She bit out.
Ah, so it was both. Still, that left one glaring question. “What exactly is it you want from me, then?” I asked. “Wealth? Power? The secret location of the Holy Grail?”
“You can start by shutting up.” She said, turning around and strutting down the trail. I quickly hurried after her.
It started off easy enough. Unlike Sunspot, the city of Lens postdated the Sword Wars, so it had no border wall to navigate around. Ironic, as a wall would have been handy in the modern era. Instead, Lens’ principal defense was the labyrinth of concrete and steel that made up its ground layer, trapping monsters and humans alike in brutal urban combat. In the present day, though, the Ghost City’s most important purpose was as a monument to human hubris.
As we approached the city center, the level ground gave way to more winding streets and fallen debris. Soulbound architecture had a certain character to it that let you know its creators were not bound by the laws of common sense, as we know them today at least. Doors on the second story, hallways leading to nowhere, bridges over nothing important, and thick stone walls that could have only been placed with - or created by - magic.
“I’m not sure you know where you’re going.” I told her, widening my steps to keep up with her brisk pace.
“I’m not sure you know where you’re going,” she countered, childishly, “sending us down a trail like this. Instead of, you know, taking the train.” We came to a section of road where the path forward was rather ambiguous.”It’s the blue diamond symbols we’re following, correct?”
I scrambled to check my Pocket Guide. “Yes. Unless you want to go see the old Emperor statue at Seventh Square?” I can’t imagine that it’d still be there, actually.
Somewhat unsurprisingly, she declined.
“Why doesn’t every mage store things in cards like you do?” Emmaline said, while looking around. “You can’t be the only person to have discovered that trick. Why even have cargo trains if people can do that?”
“It’s a mix of things.” I said. “The first is economical. Mages are scarce and their time is better spent doing literally anything other than hauling cargo by hand. The only nation in history that had enough magically literate people to afford that luxury was the Soulbound Empire, and, well,” I spread my arms out towards the ruins around us, “you can see how that turned out. The second reason is that, when a mage does decide to store things, you’re trusting the cargo entirely in their hands. You’re not getting it back unless they want to give it back, or you kill them. I can imagine a lot of couriers holding their package hostage to negotiate for a higher fee at the end. If they have magic and you don’t - the most common scenario - you don’t really stand much of a chance.”
I mulled over whether to reveal the last reason, before deciding it couldn’t hurt. “The third reason is that storing things requires a temporary investment of your magic. Having something stored reduces the amount of magic you can bring to bear unless you take it out of storage, proportional to the volume. This is why I can’t just take a beach day every once in a while and store trillions of liters of seawater.
“The Saint King could likely store an entire train of cargo, but he probably wouldn’t be as fast as a train afterwards.” I said. “That’s why, in a nutshell.”
“You said something about holding items hostage,” she said, “but what if I took those cards you were carrying and ripped them up?”
Such a violent impulse.
“The cards are just a physical representation of the spell.” I said. “They’re assistance. For a professionally trained mage, they’re not necessary, and if you tore them up the item would still be stored as long as I could maintain my focus. The real pattern is drawn in between the two sheets of paper that make up the card in a special ink.”
“It still seems strange. You’re willing to sacrifice some of your power for the sake of having all that space?” She said.
“For me, the trade off of having certain items on me is worth it.” I said. “You can at least see the convenience of having extra water on hand. At my skill level, the extra defense and speed I gain by giving it up might not be worth the cost of not being well prepared.”
That seemed to satisfy her curiosity, for now.
Emma continued to scan the surroundings until she found something. “Up there!” She pointed. Sure enough, peeking through the second-story window of a nearby building was another one of the trail markers. I traced it forward with my eyes, all the way to a pedestrian bridge that seemed to cross over a section of road now obstructed by a twisted lump of steel and concrete. I deduced that the path must have continued inside.
I stepped towards the glass doors, which seemed to have been fixed shut when the trail was abandoned. I braced my palm against the edge of the door and pushed, letting out a grunt. Slowly, with far more effort than should have been necessary, the rusted wheels crept down the tracks, opening the door with a loud whine. I let out a breath and rested my back against the doorframe, looking over at Emmaline. “You could have helped, you know?”
Rather than answer, Emma stepped into the building through a thoroughly broken floor-to-ceiling window to the side of the door. Which, now that I looked at it, had a very faded blue diamond painted on it. I cursed under my breath and continued up the trail to the second floor, past the rest of the long-rotted storefront.
“You had a question earlier,” I said, “something like, ‘why did we choose to enter the city through a twelve kilometer hiking trail, instead of just driving in?’”
“Or take the train.” She said, clearly exhausted. “Or airship. If this was all just to get past the militia checkpoint, remind me why we had to take a car at all?”
That’s a trick question, because I never told you why in the first place, I thought. “Well, there are a lot of reasons…” I began, “...but the biggest one is an escape route.”
“An escape route twelve kilometers through a ruined cityscape?” She asked. “On foot?”
“It’s not like that…” I trailed off. This wasn’t the first time she had taken something I said for a different meaning, and this time, at least, it didn’t feel like she was antagonizing me. I must have been out of practice holding a conversation. Or, I thought, there’s a difference in assumptions at play here.
“Emma,” I said, “if we’re getting chased by the Bladebound and there’s someone faster than us on our tail, we’re not going to outrun them. Not in an airship, train, or car. If it comes down to that,” and it likely will, “we’re gambling with our lives on the chance that we can take our tail down. With guns, and explosives. If we hit them hard and fast, they’ll be out of commission for long enough for us to make an escape. It’s part of why I requested so much ammunition before we left.”
“So you’re betting it all on us not being chased?”
“Not precisely. It depends on who we’re fighting, really. The average foot soldier or officer is still at the level of power where they're vulnerable to small arms fire. But we’ll get into that later,” I said, “probably when I show you my other ‘trick.’”
We hit a steep drop in the trail where a ladder down the face of a building had rusted away. I looked around in all directions, just to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. “Speaking of, we’re going to have to drop down.”
Emmaline spoke up, behind me. “I thought you were only willing to exchange tricks with me,” she said.
Without looking back, I shook my head. “Not this one. It’s too important to fuck around with. Even I have standards.” I paused. “Also, pretty much every mage you meet will have an Aura of some variety. ‘S how I learned it.”
“Aura? Is that the name for the force field you have?” She asked.
Closing my eyes, I summoned my magic. Like a spark catching fire, threads of magic wove around me, guided through the cheap spellbindings I wore on my body, arms, and legs. I could feel my movements become lighter, some of the burden of the hike easing off. It wasn’t much - it couldn’t be, with how much I had stored in my deck of cards - but it would suffice for a demonstration.
“I’ll talk more about it later, obviously,” I said, “but this is one of the more fundamental spells. I’m pretty sure Aura is one of the church’s vaunted sacred sword arts, meaning it is literally biblically old.”
“A force field.” She said blandly.
I turned to her. “Do you have a way to follow me down?” I asked. “If at all possible, I wanted to avoid carrying you.” She made a sour face, and then nodded at me.
With that, I hopped off the two-story ledge. Even bending my knees to go along with the force, I hit the ground with enough speed that I could feel my bindings stretch nearly to the point of breaking. Once I felt everything settle, I stood up and stepped forward to clear the way. I turned around and shouted up to Emma. “You get all that!?”
She didn’t reply, instead taking a plunge of her own. The tendrils of shadow she could conjure displayed their versatility here, as on one side, one extended from her waist to the building, acting as a sort of bungee cord. Once she got closer to the ground, several more exploded outwards and pushed off the pavement, slowing her descent to the point that she could gently step onto the floor.
I noted that it was still the same power she had displayed at the fire in Sunspot. I wondered if it was a scenario like mine, where she was limited by her knowledge, or if she was simply incapable of learning other magic. It wouldn’t do to speculate until I had time to teach her.
She approached me.
“It’s not just a force field,” I said. “Aura also does some weird things with inertia - more if you give it more power. It also multiplies your strength? For a certain definition of ‘multiplies.’ Or maybe that’s all part and parcel of being a forcefield for all I know.”
“No, you’re right, that is weird.” She replied. “How does it work?”
“How do your tentacles work?” I asked.
She frowned at me.
Was this another miscommunication? “No, I don’t mean in the sense of a quid pro quo. I’m trying to make a point.” I said. “If you have an answer to the question of how magic does the things it does, I’d love to know. There’s certainly a level of complexity involved - the spellbinding for Aura wraps around the user, implying that it’s at least a guide for where the effect should go. But compared to the effects it demonstrates, the spell is literally impossibly simple-”
I realized I had lost my train of thought. “Anyway, if you have an answer to that question, other than god did it, you’re miles ahead of any modern mage. Certainly better than me.”
I could tell she was mulling it over, so I gave her some space while I explored the quad we had landed in. We were about half of the way to our destination, meaning that we were close to hitting the part of the city that was recently abandoned, as opposed to abandoned after the Great War. I walked across an overgrown garden to a pathway in the back, which opened up onto one of Len’s main streets.
Mostly clear of debris, civilization was actually within sight. Framed between the wall-to-wall buildings and the few skyscrapers in this part of the city, this street was one of the few in the city that lined up neatly with the main airport tower. Looming over every other building, where most skyscrapers would have many floors, the airship dock was pure structural support for the first hundred stories. Six braces jutted out from it, three on opposite sides, almost like a giant steel dart. Concealed within, I knew, were the cargo lifts that carried people and goods to and from the ships that were moored there.
Every city on the continent had one, but I knew each tower was utterly unique in its own way. Lens’ was familiar to me, and it had been a long time since I had seen it. I sighed.
“Cole?” Emma asked. She had approached while I was distracted.
“You’ve caught me at the intersection of two of my passions.” I admitted. “I consider myself a student of magic, and a student of history. There’s very little that exemplifies that more than airships.”
I heard a snicker. I turned towards her to find her gaze locked on the tower too.
“Do you even hear yourself?” She laughed. She puffed herself up. “‘I consider myself a student of history.’” She mimicked. “Airships are cool. You don’t need to justify liking them.”
A pause. “Hey…” she said. “You never did say why you chose the hike over other options.”
“I can’t afford first-class tickets.” I joked. The two of us continued walking further. Despite the clear view of the city, it wasn’t a straight shot to our destination, so everything but the top of the tower quickly disappeared from sight.
“More seriously,” I continued, “it’s jurisdictional. It’s easier for the Bladebound to lock down a train station or airport than it is for them to even notice we’re using a road.”
Her eyes narrowed. “There’s no way they go out of their way to lock down a train station to keep us from leaving.”
“You’re being optimistic about our chances.” I countered. “We’re breaking someone out of prison. This isn’t like burglary or assassination, where they might not know a crime has even been committed until someone stumbles across the scene. Our presence will be inferred almost immediately. We’ll be lucky if we make it out of here with them only knowing our height and general build.” I explained. “And she’s on death row. This crime is literally unprecedented in the history of the Commonwealth.”
“This is step one?” She grimaced.
“Independent mages are in short supply, I’m afraid,” I said. “Theoretically, the two of us could steal my reward first, but the heat would make breaking her out harder, not easier. That and Blades take some time getting used to, or so I’m told.”
She was silent for a moment.
“Anyway, that’s most of the reason for choosing the car.” I said. “Trains aren’t too hard to sneak into. However, it would be trivial for them to stop anyone of our height and hair color at the station, and there are only a few possibilities for where and when we might show up elsewhere. Airships are worse. Assuming we hijack one, it’s still entirely conceivable they just station people at every airport on the continent. There are only like fifty of them. That’s assuming we find one that doesn’t require a mage as an operator. After that, well, there’s only one way down.”
“Don’t tell me you’re speaking from experience.” She said.
“Of course not, I would never hijack an airship-”
“-train. You’ve robbed a train.” She stated. “What did you say? Trains aren’t hard to sneak into?”
“Robbed is a strong word…” at her look, I continued, “...it was more like stowing away. It would have been expensive to buy a ticket…” I said. She gave me another look. “...and, while I was there, I might have taken some food from the cargo. Not a lot!”
“The fare is less than a hundred dollars to cross the whole Commonwealth! Where were you going, Erdberg?” She asked. “Saint City? Just because you’re a thief doesn’t mean you need to steal every waking moment of your day!”
“Like you’re one to talk about necessity, Miss ‘The criminal justice system can’t be trusted to blow this guy’s brains out.’” I said.
“You agreed with me!” She said. “He was an arsonist! He killed like a thousand people!”
“You had a gun!” I said. “What was I supposed to do, put his head back together?”
The hostilities continued until we reached our next obstacle. A canal divided one half of the street from the other, and the bridges across had all long since been blown up. We could continue until we hit the main road, but that would defeat the point of having taken the trail in the first place. Fortunately, the people who made the trail had helpfully attached a rope swing to a tree that would allow us to get across the canal. Unfortunately…
“I am NOT taking that.” Emma said. “I know how this story goes. They made me read this book in middle school. The rope snaps, and the next thing I know, I’m someone’s childhood tragedy.”
“You weigh like seventy kilograms soaking wet.” I said. “The water isn’t even moving. You could swim across if you felt like it.”
“That’s worse!”
“Suit yourself,” I said, pulling the rope back.
“I won’t mourn you if you die, you know. I couldn’t explain something this stupid to the other people at the graveyard.” She continued to bluster.
I got a running start, jumping a little bit before the ledge. The rope frayed a bit as I put my full weight on it, but it held long enough for me to get to the other side. I landed with a little skip and turned around to check on Emma, only to see her standing there with her hand over her face.
“Cole!” I heard Emma shout. “Are you alive? I covered my eyes because I didn’t want to see you drown in a pool of stagnant parasite water.”
I rolled my eyes.
“You know what, if you are drowning like a dog, see if you can give some kind of signal,” she said, “like ‘blrlglgfhgh.’ That way, I know to throw a tendril in to save you.”
“I made it across,” I said, gently, because the canal was only ten meters wide. “Your turn.”
She stopped pretending to cover her eyes. She gave the rope a few cautious pulls before crossing her arms. “This is sketchy.” She said.
“So you’ve mentioned.”
“Well, that was before I tested it out. Now that I have, I know for sure.” She said. “No, this won’t do.”
She paced over to a part of the canal edge where the concrete was fairly clean and looked across. Then, in a completely unnecessary display of magic, she conjured a tendril of shadow across the gap and began to tightrope walk across the canal.
“That’s supposed to be less sketchy?” I asked. “Where did you even learn how to tightrope walk anyway?”
“I’m focusing.” She cautioned me. “Unlike you, I actually completed my public education. I did gymnastics in high school.”
“And yet you’re not physically fit enough for a short hike,” I said.
She jumped off the line with a flourish, and the shadows vanished behind her. “It’s not my fault you’re built like a martial artist.” She said. “Maybe if you were a better thief you wouldn’t have to run so much.”
Regardless of her complaining, it wasn’t long before we began to reach familiar territory. The old, brutalist style of Soulbound architecture began to blend with the more modern style of retrofit buildings.
“See those power poles?” I told her. Typical in Commonwealth retrofits of Soulbound buildings, the electrical grid had been added by bolting an elaborate network of conduits straight to the concrete. I had seen a number of buildings just like this in Inner Sunspot, albeit those were occupied and much more lively. “That means most of this stuff was abandoned within the last century. We’re getting close to New Lens.”
“I still don’t get why people would abandon perfectly good property like this,” she said, gesturing towards a set of buildings that were at least 30% mold by volume.
Still, I get where she’s coming from, given that a large part of the issues in Sunspot boiled down to there not being enough housing to fit everyone.
“Monsters, mostly. We’re not close enough to No Man’s Land for them to be common, but we’re close enough that you’re far more likely to be murdered by a stray zombie than a human, and in these tight quarters, it’s almost harder to hunt them down than the forest. I know the two of us are deadly enough that it doesn’t seem too scary, but you have to wonder how many corpses show up in the paper before you consider moving out at all costs.”
“Do we have to wonder?” Emmaline asked. She picked up a newspaper from an abandoned vending machine after busting the rusted lock with her shoe. “ZOMBIE SPOTTED IN WEST LENS” said the edition of Lens of Truth . The date on the paper was the Sixth of Primary, 323, a little over thirty years ago. The cover image depicted a sensationalized figure hunched over in an alleyway. Knowing how long it took to take photographs back then, it was likely just a person in bad makeup.
Wait, did she have to bust the lock open if we were only going to look at the front page?
“Well,” I said, “it probably wasn’t that precise paper, but you get the idea. One thing led to another, and people decided there wasn’t much reason to stay here. Lens was built up as a freight stop between the old capital and Sunspot, transporting goods to the Numeric Coast. Take one of those factors out of the equation and add in a dash of post-war forced relocation and you’ve got all the ingredients you need for people to flee a city. Not that it all happened all at once, of course.”
“You’re mixing your metaphors,” Emmaline said. “Are factors supposed to be ingredients? What are you cooking?”
What is this, a riddle? “If it’s anything like my last calculus class, alphabet soup. I’m a thief, not a mathematician.”
“You’re an idiot.” she said.
“At least I’m not an idiot and a child.” I said.
She gave me a stern look, which I assumed meant I insulted her beyond her ability to recover. “No, seriously,” she said, “you can’t be more than a year or two older than me.”
“I’m an old soul.” I joked. “Burdened by the ghosts of a thousand dead civilizations.”
“You don’t even have wrinkles.”
The strange, mournful feeling returned as we continued to make our way towards the New City. If our journey had us moving through time, through different eras of disaster, we were rapidly approaching the modern day. The city of Lens had come out of the end of the Great War with 2.5 million people, likely many more in the suburban outskirts. In the initial decade of confusion after the war, close to half of the population left. After that it slowed to a trickle - a hundred thousand a decade, with waves of reclamation and abandonment. And then, as monster attacks seemed to uptick, the population dropped from a little under a million to four-hundred thousand in less than ten years. I lived here eight years ago. As a child. And so…
“I’ve been here before,” I said suddenly. We had only two blocks to go before we hit the New City. At this point, it was late evening, and the temporary chain link fence that defined the city limits of New Lens was barely visible, save for the fact that the street lights dramatically cut off the moment you were outside of it.
“You have?” Emma said.
“Eight years ago, I lived in Lens. A lot of these places were still open back then.” I said. “I used to explore as close to the fence as I could as a kid.”
It hit me how rapidly things changed around here, the severity of the problem in No Man’s Land. A lot of the refugees who perished in the fire in Outer Sunspot were probably once my neighbors. I suddenly felt a little guilty for telling Count Sunspot the crisis ‘wasn’t my problem’ just to eke out a bit of extra compensation. Still, if I hadn’t, would he have revealed the location of my reward?
I looked at Emmaline, who was definitely beginning to flag a little. All's well that ends well, I guess.
“Follow me.” I said. “There’s an abandoned hotel nearby that we should be able to camp out in for a night. This part of the city should still have running water. We can stow our things here and find better accommodations in the morning.”
“Living among the moldy pillows?” she asked.
“They probably stripped out all of the bedding before they abandoned the place,” I said. “Also, I saw you pack a bedroll. Unless you want to go through the trouble of paying for a room tonight.”
The hotel was only about a block away, and it was abandoned, as I suspected. Mysteriously, tourism wasn’t very popular in Lens. Its most popular attraction outside of the stadium or history museum was the city park the city often held concerts within, which had all of the atmosphere of a damp graveyard. I would have expected squatters, but rent in Lens was pretty cheap, so I doubted it.
Nevertheless… “Get your weapons out,” I said as I approached the door. Emmaline withdrew one of her pistols from her bag, and a tendril snaked around her arm again, presumably to help her steady her gun. Meanwhile, I shuffled through my deck until I reached the Three of Spades, which held the semi-automatic rifle I had purchased at Sunspot a few mornings prior. Once again, magic threaded through my bindings and gave me a bit of strength.
I opened the door, and the two of us swept the room. It was an empty hotel lobby. Go figure. I kept my ears open for any disturbances, and to my surprise I heard something.
Thump. Followed by a long pause. Thump. I would have said squatters, but it was far too… mechanical. A generator? Except it was too slow. It was definitely within the building.
“Do you hear that?” I asked her.
Emma nodded, and I tossed her a flashlight. We continued to explore upward until we hit the third floor, where we determined the sound was loudest. There was a small atrium with a dried-up fountain, and the silhouettes of old pieces of furniture that had once constituted a recreational area. Still, the sound continued. Thump. Another long pause. Thump.
“Hello!” I shouted. “Anyone there?!” I waved my flashlight around.
Thump. A silence filled with our footsteps. Thump.
Finally, we reached the source of the noise, a hotel room. 326. There was another thump that confirmed it was someone - or something - knocking on the door. I tested the door handle only to find it locked. Thump.
“You have ear protection on?!” I asked Emmaline. I turned, and she gestured with one of her tendrils, patting the side of her head. I’m pretty sure I didn’t see her put them in, so I bumped up my estimate of her dexterity a little bit. My bindings would take care of my own hearing. Thump.
“Get ready to fire!” I shouted. Rather than try to smash the door open, I fired a few rounds into the bolt.
Immediately, chaos. The door shot open, a figure with pale skin and sunken eyes scrambling through, smashing past bits of a broken chair that had clearly been braced against the interior door to lock it in. I fired three more shots, one of them missing the zombie entirely and two missing critical areas. It closed the distance and leaped at me, so I crossed my gun in front of my chest in defense. I backpedaled, but it managed to sink its teeth into my arm.
The aura around my arm shattered, and it bit into my clothes. I couldn’t tell if it had broken skin because the backlash had numbed my arm. However, at least I didn’t panic. Emmaline didn’t have a clear shot. So I did the best I could and fell backward onto the floor while the zombie continued nibbling on me.
In a moment, I heard two shots. The first hit the zombie through the head, instantly killing it. The second passed through the space where the zombie’s head used to be and hit a wall, because the zombie had shattered into ash and dissolved. Immediately, peace.
I let out a massive laugh. “Ha!” I shrieked. I curled up in a ball and cradled my arm. “Take that, you rotten motherfucker!” I scrambled and leaned against the wall, kicking the air where it used to be. “That’s what you get for trying to jumpscare me!”
Emma was less than impressed. “It did jumpscare you. You missed three shots at point-blank range, and then let yourself get grabbed.”
Disregarding her, I stood up, bracing myself with one arm. I fished around in my pocket for my deck, and retrieved a card that had an electric lantern in it. Switching it on, the area around me was lit up bright enough to drown out the two flashlights. Enough to see that Emmaline had started making her way to a nearby light switch. “Wait,” I said, “don’t bother-”
Despite all odds, the electricity for the building was somehow working. They didn’t even bother to disconnect it from the grid? I was glad this little recreational area didn’t have any windows because it would have been a dead giveaway. The entire area lit up bright enough to drown out my lantern. I suppose that shows me for making assumptions.
She rushed back to my side. “Are you hurt?” She asked.
“I’d like to know that myself,” I said. “I can’t particularly feel anything.”
I shook my whole body to shake my arm out. A bit of ash fell from my sleeve - the remnants of the aura binding that broke when the zombie bit my arm. Then, for good measure, I took off my jacket.
It took me a minute to crane my neck to get a good angle to see the injury, but to my surprise, it didn’t look too bad. A few pinpricks of blood soaked through the sleeve where the zombie broke skin, but it wasn’t much worse than a scrape. It would still need first aid treatment, though.
I turned to Emmaline and addressed her with a dire stare. “We’re going to need to cut it off. Otherwise, I turn in five hours.”
Her face went through a mix of muted emotions, including shock and horror, that felt a bit too authentic for someone who was on the receiving end of a practical joke. She started looking around in her bag for something.
“Emma.” I said. She didn’t look up. “Emma! You do know I was joking, right?”
That seemed to break her out of her trance. “I… you…”
“Me,” I said.
“... you absolute cunt! ” She shouted, driving her fist into my gut. “Why would you make a joke like that?”
“Zombies don’t work like that!” I wheezed. “I assumed you knew!”
She took a few breaths to calm down. “Right.”
“You need to read fewer comic books,” I said. “As far as we’re aware, there isn’t a vector through which people become zombies. They could be constructs, as far as we know. And if there is one, it sure as hell isn’t spread by biting .”
“Right.” She said mutely. I still wasn’t entirely clear on why she had even considered it a possibility. She didn’t strike me as someone unaware of the facts - so why the panic?
Ah, I wasn’t going to get anywhere with speculation. “You know what is spread by biting? Bacteria. I’ll unseal my first aid kit, but I’ll need some help bandaging this up.” My right arm flopped uselessly.
“Is it… numb?” She asked.
“That’s…” I struggled for a moment to describe it, “...the cost of the aura spellbinding.” I explained. “The reason why it’s not always useful at lower skill levels like mine. If the spellbinding breaks, the backlash will numb whatever part has been hit. If I took a solid blow to the head, it would probably knock me out for a few hours.”
She let out a sigh. “Good to know.” She yanked my arm with a little more force than necessary and began to roll my sleeve up.
“If you bruise it, I will feel it in the morning.” I said.
“Good.” She replied.
Dimly, I realized that however hostile she was, she did at least earnestly care about my well-being, which was more than I was expecting from our temporary partnership. I thought it boded well for the future. Assuming I didn’t put my foot in my mouth anymore, that is.
Sometime later, the both of us had finished unpacking our things. We had set up a little organization scheme in the recreation room, with various piles of junk having been unloaded from Emmaline’s backpack and my deck of cards. Hopefully, the extra wiggle room would allow me to sustain a blow larger than a bite.
At some point, while I was waiting for the numbness of my arm to wear off, Emmaline had scouted out the other three floors of the building above the one we were on to check if there were any more surprises hiding in hotel rooms. Unsurprisingly, the answer was none - broadly speaking, zombies were animated by a sense of absolute hostility to human life. They didn’t hide, and they didn’t do subtlety. That one had only managed to stay in the room for so long because someone had trapped them in there. But, of course, it was always better to be safe than sorry.
That of course, left the question: what precisely was in the room that the zombie was guarding? I explored the rest of it on my own while she was away. The answer was, not much. Like I suspected, whoever owned the building had stripped any useful furniture away when they had closed down. The only things left were tables and desks, things that were basically made out of cardboard in the first place. Additionally, however, there was a book sitting on the windowsill. It was a handwritten journal, pages fused together from a bit of water damage over the years. I couldn’t make out the name - or maybe it just never had any attribution at all.
The only intact pages were at the beginning. The header read “ The People I’ve Saved ” and what followed was a list of names that felt nearly a mile long. Beside each was a note, each with some kind of explanation, like “burned a zombie to a crisp” or “pulled out of traffic”. I tried to piece together the scene in my head.
The hero, the author of this notebook, lured a zombie to the third floor and trapped them inside the room. The window was slightly ajar. They put a chair against the door and locked it to keep the zombie from escaping, and then left through the window - leaving their book behind and presumably plunging to their death. Of course, I checked the ground below the window. I found nothing. I tried to conjure up justifications. Maybe this incident was the one that caused everyone in this block to move out in the first place? Stranger things had happened.
Deep down, though, I knew that there was something foul going on. I clutched the notebook between my fingers, as sensation began to return to them. Something new slotted into my agenda for the Ghost City - something that I would tell neither Emmaline nor our enigmatic sponsor.
Before we left, I would find out what exactly happened in this room.